Stacks on Stacks

Comparing schemas across Postgres databases

Jun 23, 2017

In an ideal world, no one would ever run schema changes in production that
weren’t already tested and applied in preceding environments. We’ve
learned that best practices dictate you roll migrations up from local
development, then test, then staging, and finally, production. This gives you
plenty of chances to catch errors and furthermore, you ensure the state of
these environments are consistent and repeatable(You are using source
control, aren’t you?).

However, this often isn’t the ideal world. Maybe someone bypassed your process
and ran SQL directly against prod? Or maybe they were goaded into it by a team
who didn’t want to wait and go through the regular release process. I firmly
believe this should never ever happen, but if it does, you need a way to restore
balance to the force and ensure your schemas are in alignment once more. Enter,
pg_dump.